Saturday silence

After Mark 15:42-47

It is not the nothing day,

although it’s common 

to think of it as that,

a bridge between

the Friday of death

and the Sunday of life.

But it is preparation day,

actually, the time to be

used to prepare for Sabbath.

The body is sought.

The body is granted,

The body is taken down.

The body is wrapped in linen.

The body is taken to the tomb.

The body is placed there.

The stone is rolled to seal the tomb.

The body is left in darkness.

It is the day of preparation.

It is the day before Sabbath.

It is the day they hide themselves away,

the day they tremble in fear,

the day they expect the pounding

on the door, the day their fate

becomes what his has been.

But it is not that day, yet.

It is the day of preparation,

and the Sabbath comes.

Photograph by Maithilee Shetty via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Our Young family Bible dates to the 1810s. It includes family records of births and deaths from 1803 to the 1890s. All of the people listed have Young surnames, with one exception. A man named Jarvis Seale is recorded as dying in 1862. There is also a Young recorded as dying that same year. Years ago, I asked my father if he knew who Jarvis might be, and he didn’t; he thought it might be a distant cousin.

As it turns out, Jarvis was a son-in-law of my great-great-grandfather; marrying a sister of my great-grandfather Samuel. He, and one of Samuel’s brothers, were killed in April 1862 during the Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on American soil. Another of Samuel’s brothers died in Texas during the Civil War, leaving Samuel as the sole surviving son. Samuel had been the youngest in the family, and he enlisted when he was 14 with the Second Mississippi Rifles. He wasn’t actually involved in any fighting; he was a messenger boy. 

For some unknown reason, Samuel gave the family Bible to his youngest son, James, my grandfather. And so, it passed to my father, James’s only son, and then to me, the oldest Young sibling in the family. The Bible needs some serious repair, but those family records speak not only to personal history but also to a significant time in American history.

This past week marked the anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh. Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War writes about a veteran / historian who actually interviewed veterans. Kristine Pawlak tells the story of a particular brigade, and what happened to it on the first day of the battle.

This past week was also the anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, ending the Civil War. Or did it? Meg Groeling at Emerging Civil War tells the story of the “seven surrenders.”

And Dr. Eleanor Janega at Going Medieval reminds us that not every pandemic is the Black Death (Hat tip: Paul Brookes). 

More Good Reads

American Stuff

‘Utter desolation': A visit to Lee-Grant 'Surrender House' in 1915 – John Banks Civil War Blog.

Poetry

Sonnet in Green and Reductions and Psalms – Kathleen Everett at The Course of Our Seasons.

Five Poems (and Readings) – Dana Gioia at A New Decameron.

Chinese Mountain Man IV: The Mountain Wood – David Gosselin at The Chained Muse.

Sheltering in place – Troy Cady at T(r)oy Marbles.

The story behind the Seamus Heaney quote guiding people through the Covid-19 crisis – The Journal.ie. 

“Siren voices lost at dawn”: Nancy Cunard, T.S. Eliot, and the Place of the Artist – Florian Gargaillo at Literary Matters.

Faith

An Update on the Church in London – Paul Levy at Tabletalk.

The Lord’s Prayer in a Crisis – Jared Wilson at For the Church.

Writing and Literature

Hearts and Stomachs: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – Scott McLemee at The Wilson Quarterly.

Rise of the Scops: Wonder After the Pandemic - Jeremiah Webster at Mere Orthodoxy. 

Life and Culture

Walking and Walking Aware – Christine Norvell at The Imaginative Conservative.

COVID-19: Crisis and Opportunity – Mark Mitchell at Front Porch Republic.

Do We Really Want to Go Back to Normal? – Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition.

British Stuff

How Did England Get Its Bizarro Street Names? – Deidre Mask at Literary Hub.

History of the Bible, Animated – National Geographic

Painting: Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1890) by Jacques-Emile Blanche. 

The darkness

After Mark 15

The day that begins 

in darkness

and ends in darkness,

the day of arrest,

the day of trials,

the day of beatings,

the day of ridicule,

the day of mocking,

the day of scourging,

the day of jeering,

the day of carrying

a cross through crowds,

the day of spikes 

driven through hands,

the day of thirst,

that terrible thirst,

the day the father

who loves him

turns away,

the death of death.

The sky cracks open,

the earth shakes,

the darkness engulfs,

the curtain tears.

It is done.

Photograph by Jason Blackeye via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Faithful Abe

After Romans 4:1-12

It’s almost a question of math,

this counting business. Simple

addition on a tally sheet as

you keep track of each work,

each good thing you do (no

one keep a tally of their bad

works). So you add them up

and you get exactly nothing,

because they don’t count,

works don’t count. Ask Abe.

Abe had more than sufficient

works to his credit, works he 

could boast about. Yet it

wasn’t what he did that made 

the final addition, the summary

on the scoresheet. Only one thing

added up, only one thing counted.

He believed.

Photograph by Antoine Dautry via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The lull before

After Mark 14:12-31

It is the usual meal,

the annual observance

of deliverance from

the angel of death

in the land of pharaoh,

the last and ultimate

plague foretold,

the death of the firstborn.

It is a celebration, yet

quiet and somber,

an annual thanksgiving

for salvation, redemption.

And yet. And yet.

This is different.

No plans are made.

It’s all last minute,

almost haphazard,

but directed, the man

with the water jug

will lead them 

to the house,

to the upper room.

Imagine the surprise

of the two disciples

told to do this.

They prepare the meal.

He talks of many things.

Betrayal by one present.

Betrayal by one who dips

bread.

He talks of the bread,

with a threefold command:

take it, eat it, understand it

as my body.

He talks of the wine,

with a threefold command:

take it, drink it, understand it

as my blood pour out.

They sing. They go 

to the olive groves

to rest, to pray.

The night begins.

It is the lull before.

Photograph by James Coleman via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The City of London Murder" by Roy Lewis

Attorney Eric Ward, a former policeman who nearly lost his eyesight to glaucoma, is helping his wealthy wife make an acquisition of a Yorkshire firm. Well, helping isn’t exactly the right word. Ward knows his wife Anne doesn’t really need his help; she’s smart enough and capable enough to manage on her own, with the help of a young acquisition advisor.

The advisor, for his part, is indeed young, but he’s gained something of a reputation as an up-and-comer. He’s also engaged to a beautiful woman, who doesn’t seem as taken with the advisor as he is with her.

Ward is pulled into a hostile takeover defense (this is the 1980s, when such events were almost routine) as a compliance officer. The chairman of his investment banking firm is also part of the defense team, and a rather unorthodox strategy is put into effect. Ward suspects that there’s more to the plan than he’s been told, and that the defense team is slipping into a gray legal area at best and illegality at worst.

Then the advisor’s fiancée is brutally murdered, and the advisor is arrested. But like everything else when high finance is involved, there’s far more here than meets the eye.

Roy Lewis

The City of London Murder by British mystery writer Roy Lewis is the eighth in the Eric Ward mystery series. It’s a riveting tale of merger and acquisition, entrepreneurs slipping onto the wrong side of the legal fence, petty jealousies and rivalries, and murder. 

Lewis is the author of some 60 other mysteries, novels, and short story collections. His Inspector Crow series includes A Lover Too Many, Murder in the Mine, The Woods Murder, Error of Judgment, and Murder for Money, among others. The Eric Ward series, of which The Sedleigh Hall Murder is the first (and originally published as A Certain Blindness in 1981), includes 17 novels. The Arnold Landon series is comprised of 22 novels. Lewis lives in northern England.

The Eric Ward mysteries were first published in the 1980s and are now being republished. What you don’t ger are stories heavily dependent upon computers, mobile phones, and DNA analyses. And the author cleverly weaves the ongoing relationship between Ward and his wife into a significant piece of the story.

Lewis maintains his consistently high quality of storytelling with The City of London Murder. It’s been a delight to find and read these stories from 40 years ago.

Related:

The Sedleigh Hall Murder by Roy Lewis.

The Farming Murder by Roy Lewis.

The Quayside Murder by Roy Lewis.

A Cotswolds Murder by Roy Lewis.

The Diamond Murder by Roy Lewis.

The Geordie Murder by Roy Lewis.

The Shipping Murder by Roy Lewis.

Romancing the Billionaire, Part 1

Billionaires. it’s its own sub-genre in romance novels, and by all accounts it’s a thriving niche for writers and readers. 

Kimberley Monpetit has written five novels in A Secret Billionaire Romance series, six in the Snow Valley Series, three in the Paris & Pastry Romance Series, and other romance stories. Two of her novels in A Secret Billionaire Romance series are The Neighbor’s Secret and The Billionaires’s Christmas Hideaway. What they have in common is that both stories have heroines who’ve been done wrong by their boyfriends or fiancés, and then go on to find their true loves.

In The Neighbor’s Secret, it’s Allie Strickland’s wedding day. She arrives at the church in Toronto, ready to marry the man she thinks of as the love of her life. The marriage doesn’t happen. Her groom-to-be sends a text, saying that something’s come up with the legal case he’s working on, and he needs to postpone the wedding. Heartbroken and not a little angry, Allie returns to her hometown of Heartland Cove, a small village in New Brunswick famous for its covered bridge. She rents an old house and is relaxing in her bath one evening when the bathroom door is opened by a tall, handsome stranger.

Benjamin Ethan Miles III is the unexpected intruder. He’s a few years older than Allie and grew up in Heartland Cove as well. He’s a photographer, and he’s using the name of Ethan Smith, trying to ferret out graft and corruption in the mayor’s office. But, as Allie soon discovers, there’s a whole lot more about Ethan than she realizes.

It’s a story filled with humor; the novel contains a number of laugh-out-loud scenes. And we laugh as we watch Allie and Ethan circle each other.

The Billionaire’s Christmas Hideaway is Book 5 in A Secret Billionaire Romance series. Reve Chatham is in her early 30s, working as an executive in the family’s burgeoning pharmaceutical business. She’s a billionaire in her own right. She is finishing a business dinner when she sees her boyfriend, whom she’s expecting a proposal and ring from any day, sitting at dinner with another woman, and he actually offers a ring to his date.

Kimberley Monpetit

Feeling completely betrayed, Reve decides she won’t go with her family for the annual holiday trip to visit family in India. Instead, she flies to Taos to spend two weeks with her old college roommate. Living next door (or at the next ranch) is Logan Redmond, who operates the local rent-all store. Reve finds herself strongly attracted to Logan, but she knows they come from backgrounds so radically different that a relationship could never work. But it’s Christmas, and all kinds of things can happen – and be discovered.

Monpetit also writes middle-grade novels for Scholatic and Young Adult novels for HarperCollins under the name Kimberley Griffiths Little. She lives in Texas. 

Both The Neighbor’s Secret and The Billionaire’s Christmas Hideaway are enjoyable, easy-to-read stories. And, yes, they have their billionaires.